When troops with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division approached the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on April 3, they didn’t expect to face resistance from Iraqi civilians. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani had agreed to meet with the U.S. commander, but asked that soldiers first secure the compound surrounding his shrine, which is a holy site for Shia Muslims. Yet the city’s inhabitants hadn’t heard of the arrangement. Fearing that the Americans might trample sacred ground, they poured into the street and shouted at the troops. “They’ve got to understand that [Sistani] wants us here,” a frustrated colonel told an embedded CNN reporter. The officer made a quick decision: He ordered his men to kneel and point their weapons at the ground. Many of the Iraqis then sat down. Tensions eased, but not altogether. The Americans ultimately pulled back because they couldn’t talk with the Iraqis.
There’s going to be a communications gap anytime American soldiers show up in a foreign country where English isn’t widely spoken. The military does what it can to minimize difficulties. Before the war started, for instance, planes dropped countless leaflets assuring citizens that the United States was fighting Saddam Hussein’s regime and not the Iraqi people. Also, translators travel with many units, though they’ve been in short supply, as the Najaf incident reveals. But there’s one simple step the government didn’t take that might have helped: It didn’t establish a TV station run by Iraqi opposition groups. This failure may already have cost lives—and it foreshadows problems that await the Bush administration as it prepares to establish civil order in Iraq.
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